POLO MONTANEZ, 5 June 1955 - 26 November 2002

*Fernando Borrego Linares, better known as POLO MONTANEZ, died in the night of 26 November 2002 at 23.30, Havana time.* He had been fighting for life in the
Cuban capital¹s Cimex hospital since a road accident on the 20th November last in which his wife was also seriously injured and her son killed.
Polo¹s death is a tragedy for the people of Cuba who had been regularly informed by radios and TV of the singer¹s condition since the accident.

Polo Montanez was discovered in 1999 by José da Silva, who recognised his genuine talent as a singer-songwriter. José quickly made up his mind to record the artist, who had already adopted the name Polo Montanez in honour of the ³mountains² where he was born on the 5th June 1955, an area of wooded hills around sixty kilometres from Havana.

Lusafrica released Polo Montanez¹ first album, ³Guajiro Natural², on the 14th March 2000. A few months later, the record was released on the MTM label in Colombia and met with almost immediate success, making a star of the artist overnight. The tracks ³Guajiro Natural² then ³Un monton de estrellas² reached number 1 on all the country¹s
radio stations and the album¹s sales rapidly climbed to an extraordinary level (to date, it has sold a total of 60,000 copies in Colombia where a platinum record is awarded for sales of over 40,000).
This success spread to other countries in the region: Ecuador, Venezuela, Panama, Mexico' The modest Cuban farm worker was suddenly a household name.

The Cuban media finally paid tribute to this remarkable triumph. At the end of 2001, Polo became a sensation in his own country where his guajiro build and plain speaking won the hearts of the people, unaccustomed to such unaffectedness. A tour was organised for the following spring and Polo Montanez succeeded in doing what no other Cuban artist had done before him: holding around twenty concerts in the island¹s largest towns and managing to draw a frenzied crowd of 20,000 to 30,000 in each provincial stadium and more than 100.000 in the great stadium of Havana, an unprecedented feat for a popular artist. Cuban television broadcast the event to many other Latin countries.

Polo Montanez¹ second album, ³Guitarra Mia² (recorded in Havana and Paris), was released by Lusafrica in Colombia and Cuba at the start of summer 2002 (and in October in Europe). The artist who appeared in Europe at the start of October was to fly to Mexico next week to promote the record.

Along with his two albums, singer-songwriter Fernando Borrego Linares
has left us a hundred or so songs. His passing is a tragic loss for the Lusafrica label which, above and beyond the artist, has lost a warm-hearted, engaging friend and a poet of remarkable modesty.

LUSAFRICA
+33 (0)1 41 83 66 30
_lusafrica@lusafrica.com

article submitted by: WOMEX